Discourses Of Vulnerability Research Articles

Psychosocial disorder or rational action? Contrasting professional and pupil narratives of school exclusion

ABSTRACT Over the last five years, the Excluded Lives team has been examining the patterns and processes of school exclusions across the UK in order to identify those factors which may exacerbate or reduce exclusions. One of most the striking aspects is the contrasting accounts of the causes of exclusion provided by professionals and pupils. Drawing on interview data from 29 school-based professionals and 16 excluded pupils in Wales, the paper analyses the different discourses which underpin their respective narratives. Professional accounts draw on discourses of vulnerability – seeing their pupils’ behaviour as symptomatic of some underlying malaise, typically as victims of adverse socio-economic and familial circumstances. Pupils’ accounts, on the other hand, are not about underlying ‘causes’, but about the specific circumstances of the ‘offence’. In their accounts, they are neither vulnerable nor victims. Indeed, they present their actions as rational – sometimes even heroic – responses to their situation. In drawing out this contrast, the paper does not seek to privilege one type of narrative over another – for both contain ‘truths’. However, it concludes that the hierarchy of credibility might need to be rebalanced in favour of the pupil if pupil-professional dialogue is to progress and trust be fostered.

Creation by Means of Loss and the Paradox of Expenditure—A Contribution of Theology to the Vulnerability Dispositive

This article argues that the COVID-19 pandemic has created a new dispositive of power, the vulnerability dispositive, and it clears up what a power dispositive is. It then explains what theology can contribute to this new dispositive. The paradox of expenditure (creation by means of loss) plays a special role here. Human vulnerability is an unprecedented power in personal and political life, social and cultural life, and not least in religion. It is therefore not surprising that it has become a key concept in international, interdisciplinary research in recent decades. At least since the 1980s, it has resulted in an enormous number of scientific publications in almost all scientific disciplines. For Christian theology, this has particular significance because of the doctrine of the Incarnation: when God becomes human in Jesus Christ, God risks being wounded. Christianity ascribes salvific significance to this path into vulnerability. But what significance does this have for interdisciplinary discourse beyond theology? What can theology contribute to interdisciplinary vulnerability research? The starting point for the following considerations is a specific point in vulnerability discourse: the new dispositive of vulnerability that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic. It made vulnerability an important argument in social, political, and religious debates. The vulnerability paradox is particularly important in this context. This paradox holds that strategies designed to protect against certain dangers paradoxically intensify the damage if that damage nevertheless occurs. Theology can supplement this paradox, which is highly destructive, with a paradox that in turn promotes and strengthens life: the expenditure paradox that says that creation can occur by means of loss.

The biased narrative of vulnerable women: gender analysis of smallholder farmers’ contextual vulnerability to climate change in the Taita Hills, Kenya

Climate change is increasing challenges in the agricultural sector for smallholder farmers. A key element in successful formulation of adaptation strategies is the analysis of vulnerability to climate change. This study examines smallholder farmers’ contextual vulnerability to climate change through their perceived vulnerability and focuses on gendered narratives and power structures in the Taita Hills, Kenya. The key methods are semi-structured interviews (N = 28) and a critical discourse analysis. The collected data consists of two-headed household interviews, single-headed household interviews, and key informant interviews with different stakeholders from the agriculture sector. Results indicate that contextual vulnerability can form a baseline for understanding individuals’ possibilities to adapt to changing environmental and climatic conditions. Outcome vulnerability analysis, that treats vulnerability as an endpoint output following mitigation actions, offers highly relevant information, but it is not alone enough for understanding the challenges and possibilities of climate change adaptation. Women and men farmers’ coping and adaptation response strategies did not differ notably, which supports the criticism of the gendered nature of vulnerability discourse. Differences in strategies appeared to be more linked in intersectional aspects between farmers in single-headed and two-headed households. Furthermore, the vulnerable women narrative did not reflect women farmers’ agency and centrality in the agriculture sector. The discourse of climate change adaptation should be corrected towards addressing structural challenges that can place people in a vulnerable position within diverse contextual conditions and intersecting attributes.

Problematizing Child Maltreatment: Learning from New Zealand’s Policies

Since all policies address problems, they necessarily include implicit or explicit constructions of these problems. This paper explores how child maltreatment has been constructed in New Zealand’s child protection policies. It questions the underlying assumptions of this problem construction and seeks to shed light on what has been omitted. Utilizing a qualitative content analysis of eight key policy documents, this study reveals the construction of child maltreatment has been dominated primarily by a child-centric, risk-focused approach. This approach assigns blame and shifts responsibilities onto parents and families. In addition, the vulnerability discourse and social investment approach underpinning this perspective have allowed important structural factors, such as poverty and inequality, to remain unaddressed. This paper also highlights the one-dimensional focus on the lower social class to control future liabilities. We suggest that the harm inflicted by corporations on children’s well-being is another form of child exploitation currently omitted from the problem construction. We suggest that child abuse should be defined and understood in policy as harm to children’s well-being and argue that the state should prevent and mitigate harm by addressing structural forces of the problem as well as protecting children against corporate harms.

‘Our friends the Chinese’: Australian advisers and images of China in the world wars

Across the two world wars two Australian former journalists – George Morrison (1862–1920) and Harold Timperley (1898–1954) – produced propaganda for the Chinese government. In doing so, they employed discourses of vulnerability and anxiety over Australia’s position in Asia. Previous arguments that Morrison or Timperley represent an Australian approach to Asia have not taken into account their biographies and their positions within the Chinese government. In this article, I argue that Morrison and Timperley’s depictions of Asia were heavily influenced both by their individual experiences and by developments in how successive Chinese governments made use of foreign journalists to communicate to the west.

Joining the dots to reimagine community resilience: empowering young people

Historically, disaster response management for children and young people, people from linguistically diverse cultural backgrounds and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples have been shaped by a vulnerability and risk discourse, informed by trauma-informed and risk mitigation strategies. These are vital, but the vulnerability discourse has moved into other areas of disaster prevention, preparedness, response, recovery and resilience. Vulnerability has been linked to pre-existing, socially produced inequalities and power structures. This has worked to homogenise, marginalise and diminish the capability of community members in resilience efforts. The United Nations Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030 [Sendai Framework] calls for governments and relevant stakeholders to ‘advocate for resilient communities and an inclusive and all-of-society disaster risk management’ (UNDRR 2015, p.23). This includes the meaningful engagement of people who are marginalised from resilience building. The Sendai Framework makes a specific argument for engaging children and young people, declaring they are agents of change who should be given the space to contribute to disaster risk reduction. The aim of this paper is to consider how the Sendai Framework has influenced the inclusion of young people in disaster resilience and to introduce emerging evidence of how young people are joining the dots to reimagine community resilience.

The construction of safe space: empowerment and the perception of vulnerability at Anglican Foundation Universities in England

ABSTRACT Young adults in university environments are increasingly exploring gender variant identities and challenging binary constructions. Knowledge about the lived experiences of trans and non-binary young people in higher education, however, is partial. Our research into Anglican Foundation Universities in England begins to address this lacuna. In particular, chaplains may find themselves acting as a bridge between the equality, diversity and inclusivity policies of universities and the Anglican Church’s official rejection of both same-sex marriage and the writing of new liturgies for trans folk; this may be especially the case for queer students who have personal connections with the Christian faith. We argue there is a need for deeper reflection on the notion of safe space and the cis-construction of trans and non-binary folk as vulnerable and we ask whether protection and vulnerability discourses create contradictions that undermine agency and positive visibility of trans and non-binary young people. This article adds to research in the field by bringing together religious and gendered identities at UK universities; it draws on interviews with trans and non-binary folk to explore experiences of chaplaincies and campus spaces.

The Vulnerability of Rural Migrants Under COVID-19 Quarantine in China and its Global Implications: A Socio-Ethical Analysis.

Despite the role of public health interventions in controlling disease transmission and protecting the public during the COVID-19 emergency, the implementation of quarantine restrictions has raised serious ethical concerns, especially in relation to the well-being of vulnerable populations. Drawing on the lived experiences of rural Chinese migrants who are subject to pandemic control, the authors highlight their inadequate capacities to manage the risks associated with the pandemic and adjust to quarantine restrictions. Informed by an ethical discourse of vulnerability, we show that underpinning this group's deficient coping strategies is a range of detrimental social structures and institutions that have developed under the persistent rural-urban divide in China. These structural constraints and pathologies expose rural migrants to serious risks and uncertainties while depriving them of the means and resources necessary to protect their own interests in the process of complying with quarantine restrictions. Understanding the plight of rural Chinese migrants as a structural problem also has implications for the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We further suggest a need for state intervention to mitigate structural deficiencies and empower the vulnerable during the COVID-19 era.

“For whom the bell tolls”? A ‘vulnerability-responsibility’ model based on democratic and ‘dignified’ transactions”

The welfare state, once seen as the best institutional response to people in need, has steadily come under pressure, as much from shrinking state capacities as from neo-liberal advocates of individual responsibility. Still, despite decline of the post-war consensus on the efficacy of the welfare state, social ‘vulnerability’ still remains the key focus of public policy. However, though much in use in contemporary political discourse, the logical and practical implications of social vulnerability remain unclear. Its essential subjectivity – it is the ‘feeling of vulnerability’ which makes one vulnerable – turns the concept into a catch-all variable, impeding rigorous theoretical and empirical analysis. I respond to this problem with a ‘vulnerability-responsibility’, model. Its parameters include a ‘responsive’ state, an active civil society and a participatory political environment, bolstered by the assertion of agency of the vulnerable. With India as an empirical exemplar, the essay shows how ‘nested’ vulnerability – a community of pro-active citizens in need of urgent and vital assistance - in the backdrop of a responsive state and competitive, robust and resilient political participation, can generate a sustainable, context-relevant process to cope with the problem of social vulnerability. The model, currently aimed at vulnerable citizens in a democratic state, has the potential of being extended to non-democracies as well as vulnerable non-citizens into its domain.

Vulnerability, Disability, and Agency: Exploring Structures for Inclusive Decision-Making and Participation in a Responsive State

By unpacking some of the dichotomies inherent in the concepts of vulnerability and disability, the article problematises some of the current legal approaches to disability in Finland. It argues that where used to single out population groups or individuals due to their embodied characteristics, the vulnerability paradigm can be seen to create binaries both among the persons with disabilities, and between the “vulnerable” persons with disabilities and the perception of a rational, self-standing and autonomous human being. To mitigate such binaries, the article explores an agency-centred discourse of vulnerability, one that recognises the co-existence of agency and vulnerability and sees agency as dynamic and responsive to the societal support structures that surround all of us. One of the central arguments of the article is that generalised approaches do, however, not suffice to make agency a reality for all persons with disabilities. Given the extensive diversity of intra-group variations between persons with disabilities, individualised solutions are needed for agency to be possible for all. To overcome objectification and de-agencification – and to enhance agency – this diversity of situations, needs and contexts of lived-in realities of individuals also needs to be expressly reflected in the legal language in addressing disability.

Practicing urban resilience to electricity service disruption in Accra, Ghana

Electricity is essential for the functioning of contemporary cities. However, despite its overarching criticality, residents of Southern cities like Accra are challenged by splintered access and limited reliability of electricity services. To maintain access, and creatively maneuver blackout situations, residents in Southern cities employ many alternative socio-technical configurations and adaptive strategies. Using the lenses of urban resilience, vulnerability, and social practice theory, we explore the everyday energy practices of residents and businesses in different settlements across Accra, particularly in response to electricity service disruptions. Here, we interrogate electricity as an enabler of practices as well as the consequences of electricity disruption, and the technologies and adaptive strategies employed to maintain those practices. Our goal is to assess the potential for ensuring urban resilience in the face of electricity blackouts through adaptive energy access and user practices. Empirically, we employ primary data gathered from expert interviews with utility providers and local government officials, neighborhood visits, observations, interviews with urban residents and businesses, and document analyses. By examining the everyday energy practices of urban residents, we argue that we can better understand urban/critical infrastructure resilience and the alternative pathways to it. We further contend that the relationship between resilience and practices is predicated on—and necessitated by—systemic socio-economic and socio-spatial inequalities. We therefore advocate for a stronger engagement with electricity user perspectives and everyday energy practices in mainstream resilience and vulnerability discourses related to critical infrastructure disruption.

Spirits and thieves, religious deviants and sexual/liberal others: Shifting idioms of danger, disruption, and crime talk in Malaysia

ABSTRACT Anthropologists’ analyses of the idioms and discourses of disruption, danger, and vulnerability encountered in their fieldwork tend to be synchronic, rarely drawing on longitudinal research to engage the historical and cultural-political dynamics contributing to transformations in these domains. This article addresses the latter dynamics based on multi-sited, historically oriented ethnographic fieldwork in Malaysia spanning the period 1978–2018. One set of empirical and theoretical objectives involves examining how and why fears and anxieties having to do with local spirits and human thieves become entwined with – if not superseded by – disquiet concerning the risks and dangers associated with pluralism, liberalism, and sexualized Others. Another involves illustrating some of the ways crime talk in the new millennium incorporates both ‘traditional’ and late modern themes and for these and other reasons is usefully regarded as a global assemblage.

Migrants in Swedish sexual and reproductive health and rights related policies: a critical discourse analysis

BackgroundPrevious research has shown that migrants in Sweden are disadvantaged in terms of sexual and reproductive health and rights (SRHR). SRHR policies might play a crucial role in shaping migrants’ SRHR outcomes. The purpose of the study was to critically examine: a) how migrants were represented in the discourses embedded within Swedish SRHR-related policies, and b) how migrants’ SRHR-related issues were framed and addressed within these discourses.MethodsCritical discourse analysis (CDA) was used to analyze a total of 54 policy documents. Following Jäger’s approach to CDA, discourse strands and entanglements between different discourse strands were examined.ResultsOur findings consisted of three discourse strands: 1) “Emphasizing vulnerability”, 2) “Constructing otherness”, and 3) “Prioritizing the structural level or the individual level?”.Migrants’ representation in Swedish SRHR-related policies is often associated with the concept of vulnerability, a concept that can hold negative connotations such as reinforcing social control, stigma, and disempowerment. Alongside the discourse of vulnerability, the discourse of otherness appears when framing migrants’ SRHR in relation to what is defined as honor-related violence and oppression. Furthermore, migrant SRHR issues are occasionally conceptualized as structural issues, as suggested by the human rights-based approach embraced by Swedish SRHR-related policies. Relevant structural factors, namely migration laws and regulations, are omitted when addressing, for example, human trafficking and HIV/AIDS.ConclusionsWe conclude that the dominant discourses favor depictions of migrants as vulnerable and as the Other. Moreover, despite the prevailing human rights-based discourse, structural factors are not always considered when framing and addressing migrants’ SRHR issues. This paper calls for a critical analysis of the concept of vulnerability in relation to migrants’ SRHR. It also highlights the importance of avoiding othering and paying attention to the structural factors when addressing migrants’ SRHR.

Trans-asylum: sanctioning vulnerability and gender identity across the frontier

ABSTRACT While legal and humanitarian discourses underscore Central American trans refugees’ vulnerabilities, individuals are often unable to access rights and protection. In this article, I address this seeming paradox by analyzing how trans asylum seekers navigate and at times contest vulnerability discourses framing deservingness of asylum. Based on interview data and longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork, I discuss continuities of trans asylum seekers’ experiences in humanitarian spaces and punitive spaces as they encounter policies, institutions and actors that purport to protect them. I argue that, however ineffective, humanitarian discourses and legal provisions impact the formation and transformation of trans asylum seekers’ bodies. Indeed, they succeed in sanctioning transness, in the sense of both permitting it authoritatively and punishing it. I analyze these effects through the lens of “legal violence” – i.e. the direct, structural and symbolic violence that the law authorizes and legitimates, concluding that trans experiences illuminate the broader violence of asylum.

Sinking Paradise? Climate change vulnerability and Pacific Island extinction narratives

The extinction narrative of the ‘sinking island states’ is well known and discussed extensively in the climate change institutions, academic literature, and media accounts of climate change. This article questions the theoretical basis upon which this narrative has developed, asking how it became so embedded in climate change politics, and what implications this narrative has both for islands and for action on climate change. Focussing on the Pacific, this article uses the insights of racial capitalism and critical feminism to historicise the sinking islands extinction narrative. This historical analysis shows that underlying these extinction narratives of doomed islands and islanders is a colonial logic of disposability that has developed over time, shifting to naturalise changing forms of violence and exploitation in the Pacific. This argument has implications for climate change politics where extinction narratives are widespread, including in justice arguments. The racialised and gendered colonial logics that underlie vulnerability discourse means it does not function to strengthen arguments for mitigation, but instead to naturalise the suffering and loss of those deemed vulnerable. Questioning how discourses of vulnerability impact on capitalist accumulations and dispossessions is therefore important, as the solutions to vulnerability are different if it is understood not as inherent, but as an actively reproduced condition that is being resisted by vulnerabilised communities.

Involuntary psychiatric treatment and the erosion of consent: A critical discourse analysis of mental health legislation in British Columbia, Canada.

The Mental Health Act (1996) is legislation that directs voluntary and involuntary psychiatric treatment for people experiencing mental health issues in British Columbia (BC), Canada. This critical discursive analysis explores how BC's Mental Health Act (1996) and the Guide to the Mental Health Act (2005) structure involuntary psychiatric treatment and illustrates how the discourses within these texts constitute people experiencing mental health issues as passive recipients of care. Understandings of people experiencing mental health issues as pathological, incapable, vulnerable and dangerous justify their need for protection and the protection of others. Protection is identified as a central legitimising discourse in the use of involuntary psychiatric treatment. Further, these texts define the roles and responsibilities of police, physicians and nurses in authorising and implementing involuntary psychiatric treatment. This analysis describes how this legislation erodes consent and entrenches social marginalisation. Alternatively, discourses of equity have potential to transform health care practices and structures that reproduce discourses of deficit, vulnerability and dangerousness, shifting towards promotion of the rights and safety of people experiencing mental health issues and crises.

Imagine All the People: The Populist and Anti-Populist Discourses of Serbian and Croatian Protests (2017–2020)

The aim of this article is to analyze the anti-populist and populist elements in the visual language of selected political manifestations. Protests in Serbia from 2017 to 2020 (mass demonstrations and one individual act of resistance) and in Croatia from 2018 to 2020 were chosen as examples. The article draws on visual materials from the demonstrations and their media coverage. The author tracks different strategies for visualizing populist and anti-populist rhetoric. It presents various types of the visual discourse of populism: the discourse of the masses, the discourse of polarization, the discourse of vulnerability, and the discourse of the gallows.

Notions of sexuality: an analysis of the interplays of gender and care among adults with intellectual disabilities in Kerala

ABSTRACT The paper critically engages with the notions of sexuality in the lives of women with intellectual disabilities through the analytical categories of gender and care. An in-depth narration of the case study from a BUDS Rehabilitation Centre in Kerala, South India, is used to trace the patterns of care that monitor the sexuality of persons with intellectual disabilities. There is gender bias in the interpretations of sexual expressions and emotions of a woman with intellectual disability as immoral and hypersexual in the BUDS Rehabilitation Centre. The prevalence of sexual ableism leads to hypersexual objectification of a woman with an intellectual disability. The sexual rights of the woman are suppressed by the discourse of vulnerability. The study also traces the resistance from women with intellectual disability towards ableist notions of normative sexuality.

Contemporary Flood Vulnerability Discourse: A Framework for Identification of Geographically-Induced Flood Susceptible Zones in Kumasi, Ghana

Contemporary Flood Vulnerability Discourse: A Framework for Identification of Geographically-Induced Flood Susceptible Zones in Kumasi, Ghana

A/effective Bodies: A Review of Eszter Szép’s Comics and The Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability (2020)

This review offers a critical overview of Eszter Szép’s Comics and The Body: Drawing, Reading, and Vulnerability (2020), a text that formulates a model of embodied interpretation and creation that establishes a dialogue between reader and artist based on their shared vulnerability. In this review the author explores Szép’s utilisation of the line and the materiality of the comic as an expression of and engagement with the body and vulnerability across comics dealing with trauma, illness, and war. Szép’s innovative consideration of the body of the reader is highlighted as an interpretive tool, a theory that comes from her own embodied reactions to these comics. In the second half of this review, the implications of Szép’s approach to vulnerability and the body are considered with regards to the Covid-19 pandemic, disability, and graphic medicine, drawing from the recent discourse of vulnerability by disabled people, the social model of disability and its limitations, and Thomas Couser's critical work on the field and genre of graphic medicine. Rather than seeing this as a limitation of the text, the author asks whether Szép’s methodology could be adopted to answer these and similar questions and point to work she already appears to be doing is such a direction.